


This Great Bright Morning

by WashiEaglewings



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: F/M, Implied Nudity, Morning After, if i want otp fluff for my birthday that's damn well what i'm gonna get, post-kh3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-30
Updated: 2014-04-30
Packaged: 2018-01-21 09:03:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1545197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WashiEaglewings/pseuds/WashiEaglewings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Months after all the dust has settled and things have returned to normal, two Masters share a quiet moment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Great Bright Morning

They’re tucked in blankets and each other’s arms, in a drunken state of almost-awareness. It’s the only time they’re allowed to be this way—between Heartless and Apprentices and keeping the light safe they are always moving, a constant  _go go go_ that leaves them breathless. Even when they’re in bed, it’s a struggle and a fight, because that’s how it’s always been with them: give everything until there is nothing left to give, fight with every scrap of passion and desire and want.

Aqua is acutely aware of Terra’s fingers brushing against her cheek, beating rhythms that both soothe and excite. Aqua chuckles as she turns on her side, lazy and blissfully achy, to meet his hazy eyes with a tired smile. He buries his face into her shoulder—his nose hits the spot that he’d sucked on, and her breath hitches as she squirms into the touch—and breathes, “S’too bright.”

Milky almost-sunlight floods the room—it paints shadows on the pale walls, hiding places for would-be Heartless, for other dark and secret fears. The windows had been thrown open the previous afternoon; it smells like autumn now, crisp and clean. There had been dark curtains over them, once, when the only way for Aqua to get a good night’s sleep had meant there wasn’t to be any speck of light anywhere. (The first thing she had done when she’d come back to this room, to  _this life_ , had been to strip them off the walls. It had been a struggle to decide whether or not to burn them altogether. The need for rags and a shirt for Ventus had won out.)

“Close your eyes, then,” she laughs, and even her voice sounds lethargic. Their bodies are still sticky with sweat and other fluids but she pushes up against him regardless, slipping her foot in the space between his ankles.

He answers by teasing the tender skin of her shoulder with his lips, careful to be gentle of the key-shaped bruise Kairi had given her the day before. “Too tired to sleep,” he says, in between feather-light kisses.

 “Or too lazy,” she remarks, teasing a few strands of hair between her own tired fingers. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Kids aren’t up yet,” he says, as if that’s an answer. It’s a stupid joke to call them kids—Sora, Riku, and Kairi are practically adults, their bodies just finally catching up to the horrors their minds have seen—but they do it anyway, for reasons even she’s not quite sure of. He lifts himself up to stretch; it isn’t much, but it’s enough to pull the blanket up, let some of the heat out. Cold air bites at her skin and she flinches. “Probably too early for them still,” he says, seemingly ignorant of the cold.

She pulls the blanket back and holds it securely underneath her chin, and laughs. “I remember having to drag you out of bed.”

“So do I,” he says, and turns back to her. “Can I just say it isn’t as fun as you dragging me  _in_ to bed?”

She smacks his chest under slightly-less-warm covers. He falls back down on the mattress with a sudden  _thump_  and the two jiggle on the mattress as it coughs them up, swallows them back in again.

“No jumping on the bed,” she reprimands.

He rolls his eyes and scoffs, “Yes, Master.”

“You are such a  _boy_ sometimes,” she sighs. Her fingers find the short locks of his hair again, twisting longer bits around joints. “How do I put up with you?”

“The same way you deal with Sora and Ven, I’d assume.”

“Oh, no,” she laughs. She pushes herself on top of him, naked chests kissing unashamed. “Not the exact same.”

“Good,” he says with a smile, and wraps her loosely in his arms.

She loves these quiet moments, when she can feel the rise and fall of his chest, hear his voice untwisted by Xehanort’s words. She’s spent so long drifting in darkness that it’s nice to be tethered by his arms. It’s nice to have a few moments to simply  _be_ , and not have to rush from battle to catastrophe to some other “part of the job” horror. And while her blood itches for the thrill of another mission, world-hopping and peacekeeping after years of frantic battling for her life and sanity... it's been wonderful.

“Do you think,” she hears him say softly, “that things can stay like this?”

"We're going to have to get up eventually," Aqua laughs.

"That's not what I mean. It's... you know."

Brow wrinkling above her eyes, Aqua pulls herself away and brings the blanket with her to sit at his feet. Terra flinches at the sudden chill; she watches as he pushes himself into a sitting position, propped up by his arms against the mattress.

“I don’t,” she says simply. "Tell me."

He opens his mouth again and shuts it, turns away.

She closes her own eyes and sighs, because  _not talking_  had been the thing to get them into this place to begin with. “If this is something that’s worrying you, we need to talk—”

“I know they can’t,” he says, and she can’t even berate him for interrupting her, not when he’s looking up at the freckled ceiling as though he’s praying to some unnamed god. “Not really. But this has just been… it’s been good. Training the kids. Maintaining peace.” Here he looks up shyly at her, naked save for the blanket that sits loose on her shoulders. “Being with you. And I don’t want that to really… is that stupid?”

They both had been trained to expect the unexpected—childhood dismissals of monsters in the closet lose their credence when they slip out of the shadows to tear your hearts apart—to conquer feelings and beings, but in this ordinary moment she loses her breath; it’s just a moment, a heartbeat, but one heartbeat of stunned silence is enough for Terra to chuckle darkly. “I mean, we’d probably be out of a job if things stayed the same, and I was—”

The blanket falls from her shoulders as she leans back against him, as she presses her lips against his mid-sentence. “Whatever you were going to say,” she whispers against his mouth, “stop.”

He only grunts as he grabs her shoulders, pulls her in close. “I don’t want to lose you again.”

There are words that could be used, but in this almost-morning moment Aqua doesn’t want to use them. She draws a star over his heart and hopes that he’ll understand—judging by the warm smile on Terra’s face, she suspects he does.

“You and me,” she promises later, when they start to slip back into their clothes and the sunshine is warm, golden. “And Ven.”

“And Ven,” Terra says with a smile. “He should be home in the next few days, right?” he asks, as he helps her put on her belts again.

“Hopefully,” she answers, combing the worst of the knots out of her hair with her fingers.

Terra leans a kiss against her cheek as he slips his armored boots on, leaves her to haphazardly make the bed again. She eyes him skeptically, but he only turns away to kiss her again. “I’ll make waffles,” he says, nudging her with his shoulder.

She’s smiling as she evades a second hit. “Is that supposed to be an apology?” she asks.

“Maybe," he replies, as he presses his nose into the crook of her neck. "Maybe I just want to make waffles.”

Tucked away in her armored shoes, he can't see the curl of her toes, but he can see the smile that flashes warm on her face. “You’ll have to deal with Sora afterward,” she warns.

“We made it through Ven,” he laughs, as if that solves the matter—and in a way, it does; excitable though Sora may be, he’s proven himself to have a better tolerance to sugar than Ven ever had. “Between us, Riku, and Kairi, I think we’ll be able to hold him down.”

“Better start now then,” she says, and pushes him toward the door. “I’ll be down in a second.”

“I’ll see you,” he says, and leaves their room with a contented smile.

Even if she has to replace a sheet or two, it only takes a short time for Aqua to remake the bed. By the time she’s tucking in the corners she can smell meat browning in the kitchen, hear Kairi and Sora stumble into waking toward the source of food.

It is a good life, and most would consider her a fool to want change. But she knows, Kingdom Hearts she knows, that things change for the better sometimes. She thinks as she closes the door and goes to meet the others, taps fingers along reconstructed walls, and feels peace.


End file.
